Writing Puts You into Conversation with Yourself

Eliot Peper, Writing is a Tool for Making New Ideas:

I suspect the same principle is at work when writing about something changes your mind. The brain is an intricate, sparkling, densely interconnected maze—an easy place for ideas to hide in vague generalities. But writing forces you to commit to specifics as surely as surfers must commit to waves. Seeing an idea reveal itself on the page, you may find yourself entranced or repulsed or inspired by its specificity, its naked meaning.

By externalizing your thoughts, writing puts you into conversation with yourself. It’s always easier to diagnose other people’s problems, and to identify opportunities they might be missing. Just so, writing from the heart gives you a new vantage on you. This is certainly useful if you’re writing for an audience, but it’s at least as useful if you’re writing for yourself.


Matt Webb, Filtered for the miracle of writing:

Writing, as a process, is almost impossibly inventive…how on earth do new angles spontaneously emerge, from merely grinding through the words?

I literally don’t understand how I can be 1,000 words into a piece that I’ve been tinkering with for a month, trying to explain an idea which is already in my head, and I’ve been thinking about it and around it for weeks, then I surprise myself as I do the work of writing and it totally turns around and then opens up a new avenue. I mean: how.

You don’t need to write for anyone else. You don’t need to share, or even keep it. You just need the act of it. Writing is a particle collider for reality and the imagination. And new discoveries are the result.

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